Winged Sakura: Demon Civil War

great game

A great dungeon crawler experience, though a little short depending on how good you are, would recommend on sale

Just to preface this, I don't normally like posting negative reviews for smaller indie titles, because I know how hard it is to make games and promote them. However I felt like I needed to speak out after my time with this, so lord, where to start with this mess?

First off - I will fully admit to two things. 1) After about a quarter of the way through the game, I started skipping every single dialogue that popped up. This mainly was because the dialogue was so inane and pandering (and I get that the latter is the *point* here) that I felt like I scraping the bottom of the Ao3 barrel. 2) I shut off the music and sound effects a hour or two in - while the compositions I did hear were decent, they quickly became repetitive, and the menu sound effects reminded me too much of Earthbound for some reason.

However, my biggest beef with this game is the balance - or lack thereof. You see, there's a passage I remember reading in the Bard's Tale Construction Kit manual years ago that talked about balance. It was about how yes, you can make a weapon that does 10d100 damage or a combat that has 99 mega-orcs in it, but after a certain point, it starts to become an arms race as to who can build the better weapon or monster. The developers obviously never had kept that in mind here, because after roughly the halfway point in the main story - and very much so in the late game and post game parts - it 100% does become an arms race.

The gear you start finding from combats (which I did appreciate that the game was rather liberal with its drops, considering that the majority of your gear upgrades come from that) starts eclipsing what gains you make from leveling up. While I know this is true for most JRPGs and games made in that mold, it started to become absurd in the post-game. I was finding myself in situations where I was finding gear that was twice as powerful as the gear I had found in the previous area, which in and of itself was twice as powerful as the gear before it. These weren't small numbers either - it was very common for gear to go from +100 defense to +200 defense to +400 defense in the span of a mere 30 or so minutes. While I understand that getting those big boosts does produce an endorphin rush (believe me, I know, I love the Disgaea series for that), it starts to make leveling up feel useless. Considering the fact that you need to manually distribute stat and skill points after every level gain, it starts to become extremely tedious to take care of.

On the other side of this arms race issue, it's the enemies. You start by facing small groups of enemies - 1-2, rarely 3, but as your party grows and you progress, it's not uncommon to face groups of 6-8 enemies by the endgame. While this isn't so much of a problem in and of itself, the fact of the matter is is that enemies start to become so powerful and tanky by the end, that AoE spells start to take precedence over single target spells. This is mainly because if you don't eliminate them quickly enough, they can and will absolutely tear your party apart - it's very common to see weaker party members get 1-2 shotted in the endgame and post-game areas.

To exacerbate this issue, there really isn't many build pathways for your characters - or combat options for that matter. Sure, the game does tell you that you can distribute your points freely, but here's the rub - not all characters gain the same benefits from the same stats (outside of two characters you get in the post-game). Ryuu, for instance, gains more from a single point in strength than Luna does and vice versa for intelligence. While most characters have both a physical and magical set of abilities, there really isn't a point to beefing up both. As far as abilities go, beyond the two that I already mentioned, you have a set of buffs and debuffs (which the latter never, ever work in the situations where you'd want to use them in), along with some status effect spells (which, much like the debuffs, are quite useless in the situations where you'd want them to work). Each character also has a set of passives that grant such a small stat benefit that they may as well not even exist. That's it, no means of diverting or mitigating damage, no clever tricks or gimmicks, no planning or strategy, every combat becomes a pure rushdown by the end. It's a tiring experience. Plus there's an ailment resistance stat that I didn't know existed until after I beat the final story boss, as the only gear that affects it doesn't start dropping until the post-game (and before you ask, no, there are no buffs that affect that stat).

To not be entirely negative on this game, there are a few things that I liked. The main thing is the fact that you can fully respec your characters at any point for free. Also, I did really enjoy the fact that the game is rather breezy in terms of progression - a new piece of gear or a new level was *always* right around the corner. That alone kept me going through the entire game, and something I find a lot of indie RPGs sorely lacking, so good job there. Also, the art was mostly good - some of the characters felt like the artist(s) had dived into a few too many "how to draw fantasy anime" books and some of the enemies were a touch on the horny side. Overall, I'd say the art was much easier to deal with in this than it is in a lot of games that go down the anime-inspired route for character designs.

However, none of those facts could wash the extremely bitter taste of the unbalanced, boring combat and wonky gear progression from my mouth.

By the time I posted this review, I already finished the "Experienced/Normal" Difficulty and unlocked all of the achievements. Winged Sakura: Demon Civil War is a really good game for someone like me that's into Dungeon-Crawler JRPGs such as Mary Skelter and Demon Gaze. Though this game doesn't fully give you the "Dungeon-Crawling Experience/Immersion", it still follows the formula of the genre.

PROS:
-The overall game is really easy to understand and straight-forward. You just need to do some experiments here and there once you fully understand what you should be doing.
-The story is pretty linear and doesn't overload you with long dialogues. Great for players that focuses on gameplay.

CONS:
-Stat and Skill Allocations can be a little bit annoying since all of your chars doesn't level up at the same time.
-You'll be relying too much on the "Inspect" button to check your buffs' remaining turns.
-I didn't have any reason to use the Summoning Circle feature to be honest.

EXTRAS:
-It is a little bit too grindy, but not that much when comparing to other Dungeon-Crawlers that I mentioned. The only time you'll grind is for upgrading gears to prepare for higher floors.

Overall, this game is really good and I can see recommending this to someone as an introduction with the Dungeon-Crawler genre before delving into other series.

8.5/10

Winged Sakura: Demon Civil War is a definitely good dungeon crawler in terms of graphic and story but the overall gameplay is just... Boring as hell. Repeating the same thing over and over again eventually made me just spam arrow keys and space, to select another levels/abilities. I love to complete games at 100%, so it was a pure pain to grind. I'd recommend this game overall, but only on a sale. It's full price is really not worth it. If you're looking for a simple, linear game, that's something for you.

kinda hard to rate this one
i didnt realise a few things when i got the game, like that it was pure talk to npcs and dungeon crawl. had alot of expectations going in, thought there would be more than 5 party members. hoped for character choice, be it classes or set characters swaped out. but even with that i still had fun, and enjoyed using the party i had i dont mind at all what i got mechanically. solid short game.

at first the lazy style writing was endearing, it was intentional, skip the fluff get to the goal etc. but then as the plot widened and twists were revealed, the parts not intended as lazy were worse, they were disappointing... confusing... and just bad. i finished the true ending with more questions than if id done the normal end. and just had this feeling of "what the **** did i just play"

im torn on this but gotta lean toward no. plots more important to me, and i ended the game unsatisfied and let down
solid mechanics just isnt enough for a game

I normally only get H-games on steam, but this popped up while I was searching with some of the associated tags for some reason. I knew when I got it that it wasn't H, but I'm fond of RPGs as well, so I gave it a shot. I'm glad I did. The artwork is beautiful (matter of fact, it's kind of a shame that it /isn't/ H, the characters in particular look great and most of the enemies are sexy women...). The UI is (mostly) pretty clean - the inventory could use consolidation (nothing stacks - if you've got 100 potions, they occupy 100 slots), but you have multiple options to filter between various types of items in your inventory and there doesn't appear to be any hard cap, so it isn't too bad. The story is decent - it was enough to keep me invested, but having finished the game only a few hours ago, I couldn't tell you any of the finer points on it - so it isn't particularly memorable. At least the characters are memorable, and for the most part, likable. Exploration is clunky, each floor is divided up into a 4x4 grid, which is fine, but going through the hallways is... weird. going to the room to the right? Hold right until you reach the next door, cool. Room on the left? Hold right... wait, what? North? Hold right... uhh, okay...? South? Hold... you get the idea.

Honestly, I'm just nitpicking at this point. The point is that despite a few small faults, the game is fun; and for the price of admission, well worth it.
9/10

This is a very gindy game. You will need to level to max to stand even the smallest chance of beating this on the harder difficulties. A nice hint for the game is to make your characters speed higher than the enemies at first so you can get the first set of attacks in and save on buying any potions. This allows you to save up the potions in the dungeons. Always be at full health and MP before starting a triggered fight . Also know that you can apply the party AOE buffs outside of the party before fights. Speed, att, def, magic, and crit up will be your best friends before every fight in the close to the end of the game. Make sure to keep them in your rotation and keep the def and crit rate up on constantly during battles. Bring your crit rate up to 70% before endgame on all characters so you can put crit rate up on so you can maintain 100% critical rate. This allows for crit healing and MASSIVE critical physical damage. Hope you enjoy the game as much as I did.

I finished it.

It's unfortunately a bit short. I liked the story and the game. It's good.

I actually don't remember buying this game, but it was in my inventory so I decided to try it out.

Not many RPGs let you freely reallocate attribute and skill points whenever and wherever you want, but this one apparently does!

So far so good - $10 might be a bit much for a basic RPG-maker game, but if it's on sale for 75%-80% off, I'd say it's definitely worth two bucks.

Itssa game with a well written story line with some interesting plot. A unique game style that allows the players to completely customize the stat point for each character allowing them to fight in a specialized way. The game play doesn't require any excessive grind through out the game level so its not a repetitive time consuming. When progresses to new area the enemy would change color and just drop, better equipment, $ and exp. Overall berry gud game, will play sequel just to see demon waifu.

Man... i have played a LOT of RPG games, mostly the ones made with Unity and boi.... this game is straight bad.
Let me give ya a scope of the game, you'll be literally throwed inside the narritive without any prior explanation, that's right, no prologue/narration, nothing. If this wasnt enough, the art style oscilates between cheesy and actually good, sometimes your enemy is quite beautiful but your own team mates seems to have something wrong with their faces, anyways, the combat isnt that good either, just a really bad designed Final Fantasy, i meant it.

I purchased this game on sale, 50%off iirc, still think wasnt worth the bucks. I'll just play enough to grab my cards, craft my badge and be done with it.

2/10

Really fun game, this game has easy to learn tactics and the hud itself is easy, i recommend using keyboard only rather than keyboard + mouse when playing cause its easy to get confused with the keys itself, but the game is reaally good and fun, also cute character (image wise)

Well made game and bug free for my time played. Lots of positives for pacing and enemies in RPG terms, a little shallow for variety of unique items and equipment. Story is quick and painless. By the end levels everyone has basically the same equipment and weapons and there is little personal choice of the matter if you want to succeed. Doesn't take very long to complete. My total time was doing a perma-death run to give it some challenge and it did have some when the stakes were high. In terms of value, five dollars is about right for a game of this duration and scope.

game was OK for a cheap game

pro:
-pretty
- old school dungeon crawlers are kinda fun
- interesting combination of western and eastern RPG styles
- I liked the points buy skill system
- music is OK

con:
- terrible localisation
- level and enemy designs get VERY samey
- sudden difficulty spikes
- a bit fanservice obsessed. oh look boobs everywhere! er... yay?
- a certain late game plot twist was a little silly

It's not bad. The gameplay loop turns into a grind quickly. With that said the game isn't very long so you should be able to push through to the end. About 12 hours give or take depending on how quickly you read/skip the dialogue and how thoroughly you explore the floors. The dialogue between characters is good. I enjoyed it. It seemed sincere. However it too gets repetitive.
I've seen some people call it a clone of another game with a Sakura skin over it. Nah it's just the cheap turn based game without any animations standard format. They all seem like ripoffs of eachother. It just goes with the genre. The gameplay takes me back to SNES RPGs but without any of that pesky actually moving around :-P

This is a Beautiful game. And it had great music.

It takes around 10 hours to complete everything including the secret ending.


The game gets very boring since you beat the same enemies over and over troughout the game.

And the game ends in a 'To be continued'. So it was just not worth it.

A classic 2D turn based JRPG with minor story elements. The game is based on knocking down doors and killing kawaii monsters. The story didn't really impress me much, but the short length of the game managed to end it before it became boring. Besides, I just dig these cute old school animimation style like Eternal Destiny, Tokyo Babel... etc etc.

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The Good
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- Its cute in its own way
- Simple mechanics
- Its short (8 hours on normal)
- Easy 100% achievements

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The Bad
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- The story is lacking (but at least its short)
- Lack in variation (monsters, skills, map design)
- The monotone grind (if you choose harder difficulties like I did first)

You want this game if you are an 100% achievement hoarder or has a thing for the Winged Sakura series. If you are looking for a solid good RPG, then this wont be anything for you.

Can't recommand this game at this current price. Maybe on sale if you want to support the creator.

The game is boring and empty.
The art is good but a game need more than pretty artworks, especially at this price.

KingDingo 3 and Cyberdown's reviews are spot on for the various cons of this game but I will add a thing or two.
No replayability value at all the moment you end the game, the max level is capped at 99 and you will get this level way before the end. You can maybe grind half an hour to complete your ancient stuff and that's all, nothing else to do after the short story.
The whole game can be done in two phases during combat :
- Exploring the dungeon with just enough speed stats, no vit and rest str/mag to hit first with multi-hit skills to kill everything.
- Get wiped out by boss, reset without speed and a mix of vit/str/mag and hard-hitting mono-target skill ( or the two-hitting ones ) and destroy him slowly while one of your character heal.
Done the whole game in six hours at intermediate difficulty like that, it was boring and I can't replay it, nothing else to do.
Except punishing myself by trying in hardcore mode but I don't really see any reason to do it at all.

Winged Sakura: Demon Civil War is a basic dungeon crawler with a very simple goal set out for you.
But when i say basic i pretty much mean that, every floor in the dungeon is 16 rooms, a 4x4 layout, some filled with monsters, some with chests, one with a healing fountain, and one with the exit stairs.
You play as "the hero" leading your group into battle hoping to bring peace back to the nation, simple story,
the group you have with you can be customized with stat points and moves and upgrades, there are difficulty settings to choose from including a insta-death mode, if your team wipes out, your save data is gone and you have to start the game from the beginning again. Theres even a small bonus of added party members if you have played their previous game *which i haven't*.

The only thing that sort of gets on my nerves a little is the monster sprites being reused through most dungeon floors, you do like 5 floors and handle one type of style, then the next 5 floors and so on use the same enemy design with a small change to colours and maybe a little added horn and such. Another problem is that this game IS NOT PERFECT, there has been 3 times the game has glitched on me in fights, once in a early boss fight, as i was fighting there was a menu behind the main battle menu, i just took this as a small bug and it would go away once i cleared the boss, once i did the menu didn't dissapear and in the end i had to face that boss 2 times, the second time was around midgame, where there were 4 enemys and a boss, not bad right, now imagine double that IN THE SAME FIGHT, not soo good then, and the third time was a endgame boss, same story as the previous. Something off the topic was one of the bosses that would spam a single AoE "Area of Effect" move somewhere around mid-endgame, near enouth single hitting my entire team.

I brought this game simply to pass the time, and it actually did that which i was happy with, but with the glitches and the random BS moments i've had with the game i have to downvote it, but if you need to pass the time with a small rpg game then wait till theres a sale on this game, its will give you something to do at least (7^.^)7.

(sorry for grammar. english - is not my native language)

Welp... What can i say?
Mindy's Arc was a GREAT game. Unusual interpretation of tower defence-style game with cute characters, interesting story and with A LOT of levels, with repetitive, but very fun gameplay.
But, what we have in DCW?
Now we have JRPG-style (can't say, that i'm a huge fan of such games), with repetitive and... boring(?) gameplay.
As i said, i'm not a fan of JRPG, but i highly doubt, that in all games of that kind main goal - kill everybody in the first turn.
But, in DCW you must do this, or you characters will be get killed in 1-2 turns. May be, it's because i played on Veteran... but, come on!
I didn't see any kind of strategy in battles. Just buff yourself before boss-fight and hit them with all your power. Even agro-skills usless. When you fight with minions, better get them some damage. And when you fight with bosses - they have 100% resist from all debuffs (and agro). All you need in boss fights - mass heal, defence buff, pure luck and lots of HP...
You even can't craft something or upgrade it...
Most of characters skills are useless. They have equal damage, and debuffs have very similar effects. And monsters even does not have element-defence, so there not much difference in fire and ice strikes.

Characters... yes. They still cute, but in "Mindy's" each character have some personality. In DCW... they just cute, and nothing more (thank's god, i've played with Mindy and Minzy. Minzy agressive attitude was a very pleasant diversity). And, even with "dialog" system i didn't have a chance to flirt with someone.. shame! =)

Story... was not so bad (except part about short, incomplete character stories), but, somwhere in the middle of game, i've got a vague feeling about personality of main character of that game. Minzy give me more clues. And, in the end, it all becomes true... it's my personal opinion, but i does not want to play as *spoiler*!! ^-^

To summarize my thoughts - it's not a bad game. It worth of it's prise. It still tells a cute story...
But Mindy's Arc was a MUCH better, and, i hope, DCW, as developers said, just a prehistory to something really good.
We all know, you can do this, guys)

The game isn't terribly complex, both the story and the gameplay. However it isn't bad by any means, and it is quite 'clean', as in there's no real glitch. If you like simple and straightforward Turn-Based RPG, and doesn't tend to criticize 70% of most little things, then this is not a bad choice.

Pros:
Excellent artwork and decent sound track. Decent dungeon crawl, simple story not anything overly heavy or complex so it allows you to put it down and come back without needing cliff notes to remember what is going on.
Stats and what they affect on your character sheet are clearly displayed and can be adjusted at anytime without cost so you can really min/max or try things without punishment. (though a negative is you can level the buffs outside combat, buff, re-put the skill points into attacks for combat. Lots of extra menuing/work but system can be abused)

Cons:
I list the blandish character development here because there isn't enough interaction and story to be waifu status like say Nep. Same goes for the story. Fun comes more in the form of game mechanics rather than story. Though for the price i'm not unhappy at all with having paid full price for the game and still recommend it.
Mob diversity. While the re-skins as you progress through the game are not straight pallet swaps, the same base model is used with extra stuff is added. The artwork is beautiful and since it's a short simple 10$ game I don't take any points off like with the story and character development.
Difficulty curve. Ramps up too much between floors as you progress 11+ and devolves into grind or min/max. Game switches from casual to oldschool rpg. There is a chivo to get to lv99, i'd argue it's pretty much needed to finish the game.

TL:DR
Short (for RPG) and simple game with beautiful artwork worth the full price for the amount of fun and time you will spend on it.

Edited out that I thought OST came with game, it did not.

As a player of Winged Sakura Games' previous release, Mindy's Ark, I've been hyped up for their next release for quite a while now, and I definitely wasn't disappointed with this game.

Art / Graphics: Everything is pretty good here, you can definitely see the improvements to the character designs the most and that's the best part. The area's and enemies designs are just as good, but there isn't enough of it. Like you go into the dungeon, and you see similar looking walls throughout the game so it always feels like you're in the same area rather than other dungeon crawlers' "You're in the same dungeon, but this area is Watery / Fiery / Earthy / ect." This isn't a huge disappointment, but what's there still looks nice.

Sounds / music: The sounds are good, but the previous issue still stands, there isn't enough variance here. As for the music, it's amazing. It fits the given situations perfectly and it's all really nice.

Gameplay: The gameplay is what really stands out to me here. You have your average characters, but they're extremely customizable with their stats and spells / skills. At any point in the game if you're having trouble with enemies / bosses, you can just fiddle with your party's stats and see how it goes. While this can get somewhat tedious, it also makes for many interesting combinations like "How much strength can I dump on this character before I get 1 hit by enemies".

Randomly generated dungeons are nice as always. You move on a grid-like area and enter rooms, what you find inside is random. Enemies, Chests, Healing Fountains, or the door to the next area. There isn't much to say here, it's pretty good.

Another thing to note is that the game has difficulty levels, which can be changed at any time in the game.

Story: There's not much I can say here without spoilers and I also haven't quite finished the game yet, the game is heavily story driven. It's a decent story and ties in well with the previous game. If you've played it, knowledge from that game will help you here, but it's still beginner friendly :)

Overall: 7/10
What's holding it back from higher ratings is that there's not too many varied things, and it get's somewhat tedious after a while.

TL;DR - It's good, especially if you've played the previous Winged Sakura game. Worth the money you pay for sure.